Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
potentially its allies) from attack was first mooted in the 1980s with SDI and did much
to break the USSR in the arms race, even though the capability was not really there
at the time. US pursuance of missile defence has divided opinion across the world.
Many statesmen and commentators are horrified at the prospect of effectively
abandoning 40 years of carefully constructed, if imperfect, agreements limiting the
spread of deadly weapons. In a prescient lead article just days before the September
11th 2001 al-Qa’ida strikes on the USA, the normally pro-American Economist
newspaper voiced its concerns over missile defence:
concentrating on the possibility of future missile threats seems to be blinding
the Bush team to other dangers. There are plenty of other ways to deliver a
nuclear, chemical or bug bomb. ...What folly for America to spend billions on
missile defences, while unraveling the rules which limit the weapons that may
someday get through or around them.
(The Economist 2001)
US proponents of missile defence have argued that the Cold War logic underpinning
existing arms control agreements has no application in the contemporary system
and thus offers little basis for enhancing international security. Enthusiasm for
the US initiative does not come only from American unilateralists, the avowedly
multilateral British Liberal politician, Paddy Ashdown, has added his support; ‘the
world is no longer bi-polar. It is a disobedient, fractured and splintering place. And it
is the fractures and splinters, not the giants, who now threaten the peace’ (Ashdown
2001).
Some are sceptical as to whether there really was a superpower consensus
on MAD during the Cold War and others have suggested that, even if there was, it
was as much by luck as design that a peace of sorts was maintained for 45 years. The
USSR, while talking in terms of parity and agreeing ceilings on established weaponry,
developed new forms of missile in the late 1970s and continued to consider that
superiority was possible through technological innovation. The fact that the Warsaw
Pact countries put far more emphasis on conventional forces and central European
battle preparations than NATO implies that the Soviet government was less
convinced than their US counterparts by the logic of deterrence. Within the US too
there were significant dissenting opinions on the applicability of MAD. The USSR’s
weapons developments of the late 1970s and invasion of Afghanistan prompted a
new strand of thinking in military security circles that began to speak of ‘Nuclear
Utilization Theory’, which envisaged pre-emptive limited nuclear strikes to stop
inevitable Soviet aggression (Kennan 1984). Additionally, historical research on the
Cold War has uncovered evidence that the world was brought closer than anyone
even imagined to the brink of global nuclear war. In 2002 it emerged that a Soviet
nuclear submarine sailing near Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis had a depth
charge dropped on it by a US destroyer, which did not realize the vessel’s capability.
A decision on whether to launch a nuclear strike in response required the consensus
of all commanders on a submarine and, in the vote which followed the American
action, one of the three Soviet commanders on board vetoed such a strike (Rennie
2002). Did Commander Arkhipov save the world? Similarly, even in the absence of
a ‘real’ crisis as a backdrop the 1983 NATO military exercise ‘Able Archer’ nearly
48